Web tool lets citizens track cash and candidates

A Berkeley non-profit startup is winning kudos for an innovative site called MAPLight.org that lets citizens track everything from how much money is being raised by the presidential hopefuls to how campaign contributions may have influenced votes in Congress.

Launched in May 2007 with backing from groups like The Sunlight Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, MAPLight.org is an Internet mashup — a Web site that uploads data from one or more pre-existing sites and adds a special twist in order to create something new.

It was co-founded by Berkeley-trained software entrepreneur Dan Newman who offered this explanation of the site’s methodology and purpose.</P

MAPLight.org — MAP is short for money and politics — uploads data from two other non-profit political websites — OpenSecrets.org, a repository of campaign contribution records, and GovTrack.us, a site that publicizes the results of congressional votes.

After electronically merging the contribution data with the voting records, Newman said MAPLight’s five-person staff adds its own, new layer of information — by searching for public statements in which interest groups across the political spectrum support or oppose legislation moving through Congress.

“About 10,000 bills are introduced over a two-year session of Congress,” Newman said, but only 1,000 or so actually make it out of a congressional committee and get into play.

Newman said MAPLight.org puts these active bills into its mashup engine so that citizens can track which interests groups, with what political position, gave money to congressional representatives, and how those representatives voted.

“MAPLight.org is at the cutting edge of a new trend to provide tools people can use to explore the links between money and political influence,” said Newman, whose group recently won honorable mention from the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism.